


the sea shall give up her dead

by Serindrana



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Drabble Collection, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-28
Updated: 2013-11-15
Packaged: 2017-12-03 22:33:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 26
Words: 11,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/703363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serindrana/pseuds/Serindrana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of drabbles set, more or less, in the world of Dishonored. Individual chapters have individual ratings and warnings, when necessary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the treatment of the dead [t]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dunwallwhalers said: The Heart on a low chaos Dunwall

_There are parts of this city that will never heal. The water will soon run back into the ocean and take with it a hundred bodies, a thousand, ten thousand, and one day they will stare up at the walls and wonder what it is like to breathe the air again._

_There are too many dead here, but there could have been too many more._

_There are parts of this city that will never heal. If they are allowed to fester, they will rot the whole body of it._

_Better to amputate, and burn_.


	2. options [g]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lady Smaragdina asked: Cecelia, either pregame or postgame.

Piero asks her one time, after the Hound Pits are just a memory, to submit to what he calls a test of blood. He takes a small sample from a slice on her fingertip, and adds strange things to it.

He comes back to her with a triumphant grin.

“You’re immune,” he says. “You’re immune! Naturally so. Yes, yes, this is wonderful, we must work together! Please tell me you will!”

But there’s another person in the lab, Callista’s uncle, and he says, “You know, there’s work cleaning up after the Weepers. If you’re immune…”

She looks between the two men.

She’s never had options before.


	3. inspiration [g]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whalepunk said: Something with Piero and Sokolov? Not in a shipping way, just in a one-of-us-gets-a-little-too-drunk-a-little-too-much-and-sometimes-it-makes-me-angry kind of way.

“How dare they?  _How dare they_?” Sokolov shouts, as if enough decibels will sway an uncaring Empress and her Protector who are two districts too far away to hear.

Piero wrinkles his nose and considers stuffing cotton in his ears. “It really is quite sensible,” he says instead, hoping reason will (for once) work on the other man. “We are running dangerously low on oil reserves. They’ve already cut electricity around noon and midnight in most of the other districts. Until we can find more whales-“

“How am I supposed to work like this!?”

“There is more to life than whales,” Piero mutters. Sokolov doesn’t hear him.

“And when Morley rebels, because they see us slipping, what then? What then? Do they not  _think_!”

Maybe giving him that brandy was a bad idea. Piero frowns and pokes at the frog he has dissected on his table. “Well, of course not, but they’re still being sensible. Burrows already used up all the oil! And your inventions are  _hardly_ efficient when it comes to-“

His voice trails off.

He taps his scalpel on the table.

“ _Oh_ ,” he says, as an idea begins to stir. “Oh, actually- actually-“

Sokolov is quiet, for once - a sign of their growing mutual respect, the willingness to actually listen when inspiration comes along instead of shouting right past each other.

“Oh,” Piero says, and then, “where’s that last canister of oil?”

“It’s mine,” Sokolov says.

Piero looks at him. “But what if I could make  _more_  of it?”


	4. the easier way [t]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lady-protector said: Ummm, Treavor, Anything with the Pendleton Twins. Like in the early years when all tree of them lived together. Mmmmm yes.

There is a time when Treavor considers sending Wallace out to contact the semi-mythical figure of Dunwall’s underworld, the killer named Daud.

It’s shortly after he turns twenty. Daud has only been a whisper in the dark for maybe four years, but Treavor is desperate one night after his favorite maid is taken out covered in blisters and burns, from an ‘accident’ in the kitchens. The way Custis looks at him, though, makes it clear: Treavor was too close to making allies, to breaking their hold over him.

They allow him Wallace, but that’s it.

Anyone beyond Wallace is cause for pain. In the dark, some nights, he wonders if maybe it’s just a test. If he fights them hard enough, if he takes what he deserves (and he does deserve allies, doesn’t he?  _Doesn’t he_?) perhaps they will at last retreat and smile and say,  _There, you are a Pendleton after all_. Maybe, if he doesn’t flinch when they attack him and those around him, they will see his strength.

Or maybe, he can hire an assassin to- just to scare them. Not to kill them. He shies away from the thought of their own funeral, even as he sends off money to the now-dead maid’s family to pay for hers. Would an assassin impress them? Or would they only laugh at him, call him over-reactive, a child still?

He comes to the conclusion that it would be foolish to contact this  _Daud_ , and that the maid had it coming. It’s easier that way. _  
_

It requires that nothing change.


	5. room and board [t]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> anonymous asked: Could you tell the story of one of the ladies at the Golden Cat, maybe? I've never seen anything written about them.
> 
> TW: forced prostitution

The novel isn’t the escape she had hoped from. When she reaches the letter from Madison Kanebright about the sister, Patrice, lost to the brothels, she can’t hold back the tears. Her mascara runs and puddles in the hollows around her eyes, and she draws her knees up to her chest, a little girl all over again.

Her brother would not come looking for her, here. She had no Madison Kanebright to fight tooth and nail to rescue her. Her brothers, all three of them, were dead and burned and lost in Morley, while she rotted away in a slower death so many miles of ocean away.

The door behind her creaks on its hinges. She’s probably missed another appointment, then. Damn them all, each and every one of them. If Prudence didn’t take half her earnings as commission and the other half for _”room and board_ ”, and a final, nonexistent half for so many imagined follies and slights, there wouldn’t be anything keeping her here at all. She doesn’t want them, their expectations and their sweat-soaked bodies, their justifications and desires and needs.

They deserve the plague she passes on to them.

She’s just opening her mouth to tell whoever it is - Prudence of one of the other girls, most likely - to get out when she feels the punch of a dart into her shoulder, like a fist followed by the faintest of pricks. The shaking in her limbs slows, then stops, and she slumps forward into oblivion.


	6. rebellion [g]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> anon asked: Dishonored/DA crossover with characters of your choosing. "news from a foreign country came"

“Morley is rebelling again,” Callista said, sitting down heavily at the table and letting the missive drop between the three of them. Corvo reached out for it, but wasn’t fast enough; their young Empress snatched it up. “It was only a matter of time, I suppose. Perhaps we should be grateful it was not sooner?”

Corvo responded only with a heavy sigh, and read over Emily’s shoulder.

“Do we know anything,” Emily said at last, “about these two? This… Loghain, and his woman, Cauthrien?”

“Only that she is not ‘his’ woman, my Empress,” Callista said, shaking her head. “They appear to be more father and daughter than anything else, and wickedly dangerous. They are a formidable pair.”

Corvo’s lips thinned to a bare line. No doubt thinking of the wickedly dangerous father and adopted daughter pair in that very room.

Emily drummed her fingers on the table, then looked between the two. “How badly,” she said, slowly, “do we need to win this war? What if we let them secede?”

“Then the empire would crumble,” Callista said. “This is not the time for sentimentality.”

Corvo stood up.

“I believe,” he said, “I know somebody that we can send. Before we unleash the navy.”


	7. sleepwalking [g]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: Umm, may I ask for a Callista/Piero drabble please?

After several increasingly thoughtful and elaborate attempts at wooing, Callista Curnow finally gave in to the advances of one Piero Joplin, and at last visited the great estate that Corvo, through Emily, had given him. It was in one of the districts less touched by the plague, though the signs were everywhere, despite the ongoing recovery of the city. She tried to ignore them.

He wined her and dined her and then asked in fumbling, halting, overly-practiced phrases if she would stay the night.

She said yes.

—

Some time after midnight, she awoke to a cold and empty bed. If it hadn’t been for how Piero had seemed to need all her body heat to stay alive just a few hours before, she likely would have rolled over and gone to sleep. But to find him missing… Confused, she rose and fumbled for one of his ratty old dressing gowns.

When she nudged open the bedroom door, she heard the throbbing hum of the electric generators downstairs, in the labs. 

Did he always work at such strange hours?

Callista padded down the staircase that was much too great for him, and found him striding from one worktable to another, intent on whatever it was he worked on. He moved fluidly, a master of his own realm.

She frowned. The Piero Joplin she knew picked things up and put them down and picked them up again, evaluating and re-evaluating his ideas a hundred times before he moved on. And the Piero Joplin she knew spoke aloud to himself, with an audiograph recording his every thought. The audiograph had no card in it now, and was turned away, as if to keep it from listening in.

“Piero?” she asked, uneasiness growing in the pit of her belly.

Piero looked over his shoulder and stared at her with dark, dark eyes, eyes that were not his own. He wasn’t even wearing his glasses.

She swallowed.

Slowly, he set his work down and came towards her, still all easy motion, his head canting to one side, much like a wading bird contemplating its next meal, ready to gulp it down as soon as it moves again. This was not Piero. Piero still couldn’t entirely meet her eyes, and his hunger was of an altogether different character.

“He has a woman?” not-Piero said, and though the vocal chords that produced the words were the same, the tone was all wrong.

“Who are you?” she asked.

He didn’t answer, coming close enough to take her shoulder. He searched her face for something, then shook his head, smiling indulgently as if to a child. “You should go back to bed.”

“ _Who are you_?”

“Piero and I are working on something very grand. You will see in the morning,” the thing said, and turned her around, nudging her back towards the stairs. “Go back to bed-” he paused, then added, satisfaction tinging his voice, “Callista Curnow.”

She tried not to run.

* * *

 

Piero didn’t come back to bed. She stayed awake all night, staring at the ceiling, always hearing the same distant thrum of electricity. Then, at last, it faded. She waited half an hour. Nobody came.

Quietly, she slipped down the stairs again. Piero sat slumped in a chair, and her heart caught in her throat. But as she watched, his chest rose and fell.  _Only sleeping_.

* * *

 

At breakfast, he asked her how she slept.

“You sleepwalk, you know,” she said, unsure of how else to answer.  _Somebody else wears your skin_.

“I should have mentioned that,” he said, expression falling.

“You were in your lab all night. Do you- do you remember any of it?”

Piero shook his head.


	8. the ordered mind [g]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: Anything with Sokolov and Piero being Science Bros?

“Painting seems like such a… a time consuming, useless hobby,” Piero says, when Sokolov comes back into the lab from a meeting with a client.

“Hardly.” He goes to the sink to wash the pigment from his fingers. “It has taught me a great deal about the properties of light and air. And it gives my mind the chance to rest.”

“Minds should never be at rest,” Piero mutters as he measures out another dish of whale oil. A few more tests, and perhaps we will at last unlock the mysteries and promises of his new refining technique. “They grow old and withered with rest.”

Sokolov humphs, loud and resonant in his chest. “ _Rest_  allows what I like to call the subconscious - those thoughts we have without realizing we’re thinking them - to work unmolested. Then we come back to the problem with new eyes.”

Piero doesn’t deign to look up at him. “Hogwash. The mind is not some layered mass of churning thoughts. It is an ordered place.”

“And what is it your mind does when you sleepwalk, I wonder?” Sokolov asks.

Piero drops his pipette.


	9. tableaus [g]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> turnonred said: Any-fucking-thing with the Outsider

His tableaus come from a number of places, though all are echoes of the world of men. Some are what he sees when he looks through the glazed eyes of a sleepwalker. Some he pulls from puddles of water or looking glasses. The most common are moments frozen in time, crystalized in memory, that come fading into existence when a person dies or a person screams or a person whispers his name.

But there are others that come from something only  _near_  memory, those imaginings that become so powerful that they cannot be denied. They burst into his world, shouting  _look! behold! witness!_  and so he lets them stay.

And that is how he finds the interesting ones.


	10. hiding places [g]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> taokan asked: Um. How about Callista and Cecelia? Gen or pairing?

Cecelia leans heavily against the bar, then gives up on standing and sinks onto a stool. Callista is quick to pull a glass down for her.

“No, don’t do that,” Cecelia says. “I’ll just have to clean it.”

“No, I will,” she says, pulling a beer for her and giving it to her. It’s from the good keg, too, something Cecelia would have never chosen. “You deserve it. How little do you sleep?”

“Five hours, usually.”

Callista shakes her head, and nudges the glass close to Cecelia, who eyes it warily.

“Go on,” Callista says. “Enjoy yourself.”

“There’s a place-” Cecelia blurts out, then takes a moment to swallow down her fear. “There’s a place, a little closet, the door’s hidden in the paneling. Out in the left hall. If you ever need it. Nobody would find you there.”

Callista doesn’t respond for a moment, then lays a gentle hand on Cecelia’s wrist. “I’m scared, too,” she says.


	11. welcome home [g]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alucifer asked: callista & geoff - better days

Callista looks around Uncle Geoff’s house, taking in all the little differences. When she was younger, she only ever came around for parties. There are no beautiful lights now, or fancy banners, or tables of food for everybody. There are no cases of drink brought in specially. He never held  _lavish_  parties, not the way the rich did, but they had been spectacular to a little girl like her.

Now, though, it’s just a house. She finds herself smiling, despite herself.

It would’ve been hard to live in an endless party, she decides.

“Uncle Geoff?” she calls out, setting down her bag in the foyer. “Uncle Geoff, I’m here.”

She can hear the scrape of a chair along the floor, one story up, and then footsteps, running, and suddenly there he is, leaning over the bannister, smiling.

“Callista! I didn’t think your ship would make it in tonight.”

There are enough years behind them that the dulling tragedies of so many family members lost can’t touch their happiness at being reunited. Callista’s stint in Whitecliff is over, and now she has the credentials to be a governess in Dunwall proper. Uncle Geoff is certain to make captain within the year.

And most importantly, they both have a family to come home to now.

“Favorable tides, uncle,” she says, and leaves her luggage to join him on the stair.

He takes her by the shoulders, then pulls her into a tight hug.

“Welcome home,” he whispers, a private litany for just the two of them.


	12. beneath the city lies a darker path [g]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> anon wanted Cauthrien/Nathaniel from Dragon Age, stuck in Dishonored 'verse!

The sewers beneath Dunwall have changed.

Cauthrien pauses to compare her maps - old maps, maps that Loghain once used in these same dripping, wretched halls - to the branching path ahead of her. They knew that there would be differences. Loghain’s small, tight handwriting marks several. The sewers, for instance, won’t get her all the way to Dunwall Tower, but they will get her close enough. And then there’s the matter of how many of them have collapsed or become inaccessible in the wake of the plague.

But this change-

She lifts her head. Yes, there are still seven paths. She looks down. No, there was only one path so many decades ago.

Who  _adds_  paths to a sewer in the heart of such an old city?

Perhaps she’s lost. ( _Perhaps_ , a part of her whispers,  _you stumbled into the city beneath the city_.) But there have been enough fresh dead along the way and enough signs of life above the surface that she’s fairly sure she’s beneath Holger Square.

She’s just about to turn around, backtrack to the last identifiable spot and rework her path, when she hears a shuffling noise that makes her spine straighten, her muscles bunching into tight coils ready to lash out.

The official news is that the Weepers are all gone now, but she’s seen one or two since she slipped in past the loosening blockade. The plague may be just about cured, but  _just about_  is not  _entirely_. Still, most are dead, killed by the Watch or by their own disease.

Those that live are still dangerous.

She checks her pistol and begins to edge backwards, watching the passage the noise came from. There’s no moaning or scraping, just a few more footsteps - tired footsteps, labored footsteps - and then the peek of a shadow around the bend, cast by one of the lingering rat lights down here.

Her own shadow intersects it.

The figure approaching freezes, then calls out, “Please don’t shoot?” It’s a man, a man with a rough, gravelly, exhausted voice.

“Come out slowly, then,” she says, trying to hide her thick Morley brogue. It doesn’t go easily, especially with her nerves. She is no spy.

Around the corner steps a man almost as tall as she is, gaunt and haggard and dressed in what once must have been fine clothes, but are now particularly unwashed. He doesn’t look ill, though. Haunted is a better word. There’s a susurration in the air that isn’t her pounding heart, and her gaze drops to his hand.

Clutched in it is not a weapon, but a hunk of something that looks like bone and feels-  _wrong_.

“My name,” the man says, “is Nathaniel. Nathaniel Howe.”

“Howe?” Cauthrien says, turning the sound over in her mouth. It clicks into place. “You mean Hiram Burrows’s supporters, those Howes?”

He flinches.  _Yes, those Howes_. The ones who lost their fortune when the regency fell. The ones who were all executed.

Except, it seems, for this one.

He keeps grimacing, then dragging his face back under control.

“Get me out of here,” he says.

“You don’t want to go the way I’m going,” she says, then hesitate. Actually- perhaps he does. She licks her lips. “I’m continuing the way you came from.”

“Towards the Tower?” he asks, then repeats, at a whisper, “Outsider’s eyes, towards the Tower.”

Her accent. He knows her accent.

She’s about to lift her pistol again when he holds up both hands, palms outward. “Look,” he says, “look, I’ll take you there. I can get you that far. There are just- there are still  _rats_  down here-“

With her free hand, she pulls out a vial of one of the elixirs so expensive now on the streets above, supplies low while the natural philosophers rework their theories and grasp for ingredients. “Take me there,” she says, and holds it out to him.

He comes close enough to take it.

And he hands her the piece of bone, the murmurs and sighs that seem to be whispering from it winding up her arm. She shivers.

He smiles grimly, and leads the way.


	13. a time [t] - corvo/jessamine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for ladywaria!

There is a time when things come easily.

The wind off the Wrenhaven can even be sweet, given it comes from the right direction on the right day, and given that it whips fast and sharp and they’re in the mood for something more invigorating than gentle. It stings their cheeks and lips as they stand out on the walls of the Tower, Jessamine pondering aloud the logistics of a tour of her empire on a luxurious yacht, just the two of them, and Corvo simply smiling behind the high collar of his overcoat.

“I’d like to see Serkonos,” she says. “Would it be safe, do you think, for me to stretch out on one of your beaches?”

“They’re not my beaches,” he says.

She laughs and points down at the rocky, silty, unpleasant bank below them. “And is that your beach, then?”

“They’re your beaches,” he says, a little smile growing, and she turns to him and tugs down the fabric just in time to catch it. 

* * *

 

There is never a time when things come easily.

Before she can arrange their tour - not so small and not so intimate, a big gaudy affair for the glory of the Empire - she realizes that her morning aches and her roiling stomach, her widening hips and sharper temper, are signs of a growing child. She cancels her trip with something like relief.

It wouldn’t have been like she’d imagined it.

Corvo finds her sitting by the fire. The wind outside is a languid, waterlogged thing, damp and dank, and his hair is sodden from it and the rain its brought. He settles behind her chair, not quite touching the upholstery.

“I’d like to see Serkonos,” she says. “But perhaps another time.”

“It would be safe,” he says, softly. “I would keep you both safe.”

“Perhaps another time,” she says, and her words have the weight of an empire behind them, a leaden, twisted thing that thunders in her heart at night.

Corvo stands there the rest of the night, silent, and he does not smile.


	14. great, open spaces [corvo/martin, g]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> martin-teague wanted something corvo/martin, so I did my best!

Corvo can’t sleep.

He lies in bed and keeps his eyes closed, but the truth is that the room is to large, to open, and he’s nowhere near exhausted enough. The nights he returns after his-  _jobs_ \- he usually finds oblivion easily. Easier still are the nights the Outsider decides to stop by, leaving his mark throbbing and painful in the morning.

But tonight is just a night. He spent the day with Emily. He ate three meals. He sat by the Wrenhaven and looked at Dunwall Tower, and maybe for a moment he even forgot what a stinking pile of refuse his life has become.

Now that the sun has set and everybody else has gone to bed and shut their doors, there’s room for the rotting filth to filter back into his thoughts. There’s blood on his hands, something he’d been prepared for all his life and had washed away many times, and yet now it sometimes crusts beneath his nails or stains a furrowed line in his palm.

He rolls over and presses his face hard enough to the pillow that breathing becomes difficult.

He’s wondering if he can smother himself to sleep when he hears footsteps in the stairwell. He sits up in a shot, is out of bed in another heartbeat, reaching for his weapons left on the nightstand. It’s a good thing for whoever it is that Coldridge had stone and metal stairs in it, not wooden. The creak of planks is the only thing keeping him from a full-blown regression to the pain-addled  _thing_  that had lived in Corvo’s skin for six months.

It also helps that, eventually, the footsteps stop and their owner knocks on the doorframe.

Corvo says nothing.

Teague Martin peeks his head in, his lips curling into a smile and his chest heaving just slightly with a quiet huff of laughter. “Oh, good, you’re awake,” he says. “May I come in?”

Corvo puts down his sword. Martin takes that as an invitation and strolls in, hands clasped behind his back, then pauses and looks Corvo up and down again.

“What?” Corvo asks.

Martin looks back to his face and shrugs. “Sometimes I forget you’re human, I suppose.”

Corvo glances down. He’s in a ratty workman’s undershirt and skivvies and not much else, his ankles and knees knobby and on display, his various burn scars and more tracing patterns over every inch of exposed skin. He still has marks on his wrists from the restraints of the torture chair.

“What do you want?” he asks, suddenly uncomfortable to be so exposed.

“A place to sleep,” Martin says. He nods his head towards the vast expanse of empty space away from Corvo’s bed. “Over there, maybe?”

Corvo considers, turning away to set his pistol down as well. “You’ve been here a week.”Unspoken is,  _you must have been sleeping somewhere_.

“Havelock and Pendleton appreciate their privacy - unexpected from the admiral, but I can’t argue it - and it turns out that Wallace snores and Cecelia sleepwalks.”

“Ask Piero,” Corvo says, not really a suggestion but an order.

“Absolutely not. I’d never sleep. He’s  _working_  right now.” Corvo looks over just in time to see an expression pass over Martin’s face that’s a far cry from his usual humor-edged seriousness. It’s not even the look he gave Corvo when he recognized whose mark he wore. No, it’s a flash of unadulterated suspicion and mistrust, mixed with a little dash of fear and anger. He looks like an Overseer for once.

It fades quickly, replaced with a pleasant smile aimed at Corvo. “Anyway, you have the space.”

“I don’t have another bed.”

“I’ll manage,” Martin says. He’s just pushing forward, not really leaving room for an argument, and Corvo adjusts his opinion of the man from  _smart and dangerous_ to  _very, very dangerous and far too clever_.

Still, the sound of another man breathing in the same room would- soften the isolation.

Perhaps they could erect a short-term barrier, giving Corvo less space and Martin some privacy.

Corvo sits back on the edge of his bed. “Do what you want.”

Martin inclines his head in thanks, then ducks back through the doorway. “Be back in a moment, then.”


	15. the missing carafe [martin/everyone, t]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> galacticdrugdealer on tumblr wanted "that one time Teague drank the poisoned wine but he didn't die or anything, he just got really woozy and suddenly everyone was attractive."

The first hint Havelock had that something, somehow, was going wrong was when he found Pendleton passed out and  _not_ reeking of whiskey. He was, however, stretched out beside the bottom shelf behind the bar. There was a discarded cup nearby that Havelock had a growing suspicion had once held a taste of wine mixed with Tyvian poison, but at least the scrawny lordling was still breathing. _  
_

The second hint came when he couldn’t find the carafe of wine in question.

But before he could find the third hint, the doors to the pub proper swung open and the whole host of the conspiracy came in, chattering on about drinks and a party and how it wasn’t fair that only the fancy Boyles got to throw one.

* * *

 

Really, this was one of his more brilliant plans.

It had all started with that carafe of wine he’d found, left like a generous donation on the small table beside the servant’s bed he’d taken for his own. Pendletone had left it by his guess - probably not strong enough for the lad.

Also rather sour. But the carafe was empty now, and it had given him the most incredible idea: a party to rival the one even now going on at the Boyles’s! Corvo would come back to feasting and celebration, a welcome respite after all he’d been through in the last two days.

And now he was leaning against the counter, watching the merriment, fighting the urge to pat himself on the back where others could see, and everything felt very warm and very smooth. Even old Havelock’s tiny, jowly head seemed suffused with warmth and good cheer and a certain rakish… something.

And then there was  _Callista_ , Callista Curnow. He grinned as he watched her drink deep from a tumbler of whiskey, watched her throat bob, clearly pictures her clothing and corset stripped away, and how her thin and pallid skin might flush if he started kissing a path down to her navel-

 _naval_ -

yes Havelock did look very fine in his uniform,  _very_  fine, and really, how had he never noticed how handsome a company they all were?

The door opened.

Corvo came in, a veritable god among men, and even the dark bags under his eyes couldn’t keep Teague from salivating, just a little.

Yes, yes, a little more beer and booze for everybody, and he was  _sure_  he could get a handful of  _somebody_. Maybe several somebodies. Maybe they could all tangle up on the floor, hot and flushed and sweating and…

* * *

 

Corvo looked down at Martin, slumped and drooling onto his chest by the base of the bar. He looked up at Havelock. He looked down at Martin.

Martin stared vaguely up at him, and grinned, before crashing fully to the floor.

“Oh,  _that’s_  a relief,” Callista sighed, her arms wrapped around her middle. She made a face. “He’s been leering at me all night.”

“You?” Havelock snorted. “You didn’t see how he was carving me up with that gaze of his.”

“Is something wrong with him?” Corvo asked, nudging him gently with a bloody boot toe.

For a moment, he thought Havelock had gone pale, but his vision was swimming from the cider from the earlier party, and two days on little sleep.

“Just too much wine,” Havelock muttered, then crouched to drag the High Overseer up and to a bed.


	16. the shape of nightmares [corvo/callista, t]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Taokan on tumblr wanted: “Puddles ran up to gather in her fingers,” and/or something about how she sees him in stuttering glimpses in her sleep, from him using that teleport spell too much

She dreams of great, empty houses and streets filled with rats, and even Emily’s voice cannot always rouse her as she tosses and turns in her sheets. The tower has lifted her too far above the river and its tributaries, the canals and sewers, and she sees too far in the daytime sun and by bright full moons. She dreams of bodies, pale and bloated, bobbing in the river.

She dreams of a man wearing Death upon his face, blood pooling in the footprints he leaves in the muck of the riverbanks and the bodies he steps on.

There is another man she dreams of, too: he stutters and starts and flickers across her mind’s eye, but she knows he is a good father and a good man, and she often races to meet him, careens into the flooding river, wades through muck and coiling kelp, and never reaches him before, silent, he disappears into the gloom.

They are the same man.

She averts her eyes when, awake at last, she passes him in the hall.

* * *

 

The clank of tallboys prowling beneath her tower is nothing to the echoes of Emily’s cries, her grasping, twisting little hands vibrant in Callista’s mind as she remembers every heartbeat of that wretched parting. Lydia and Wallace still lie dead in the courtyard. Emily is still gone. The gulls cry and the Watch, no longer her uncle’s men, talk of cigars and the fate of the city.

Callista counts her grenades and her bullets and her tins of hagfish, and then she tries again to sleep.

What sleep does come is empty, hollow, filled with deep cenotes that only hold a single body. Death has lost its mask, and is instead only a man, bobbing face-down on the surface of the water.

She wakes up with tears dried to crust at the corner of her eyes. Only an hour has passed.

* * *

 

Death stands in her doorway, and at first she doesn’t move, doesn’t whisper, doesn’t breathe. Even the mask is a blessed sight now, and her first movement is to reach out a hand. She wants to trace the metal, feel the burlap,  _know_  beyond knowing that she isn’t dreaming. Catching her finger against one of the bits of wire, pulling blood from her skin, that wouldn’t do it; she knows all too well that it is very, very possible to hurt in dreams, to ache and scream and wail. 

But she has never been able to touch him before, not in a dream.

He takes off the mask before she can reach him, before she takes a single step. Corvo’s eyes are hollow and exhausted, his brow lined, his expression haunted.

“Is Emily-” he says, then stops.

Death is only a man. She can see the terror in his gaze, the way it flicks to and fro. There are no more tallboys clinking in the yard. She doesn’t want to think of how much blood pools on the ground below. He has killed ten men, a hundred, a thousand, but he is still small and scared, a mirror of her.

“She’s alive,” Callista says. “Don’t worry, you’ll save her. She’s on Kingsparrow Island.”

The lost look fades, and is replaced by grim determination, a stoniness she has seen before when, after a funeral, she has looked in the mirror.  _We go on_ , she thinks.

“I’ll call Samuel for you,” she says, and moves to the window.

He is gone the moment the flare goes up.

In another time, in another life, perhaps…

But Callista knows, more than most, that gentle, happy dreams fade in the morning. It is the nightmares that remain. She counts her grenades and bullets again.

* * *

 

He returns triumphant.

The nightmare is over.

* * *

 

Except it isn’t, not really. The plague still rages. She still dreams of bloated corpses. She returns to her uncle’s house, but half the buildings on their street are boarded up. Her uncle expects they’ll have to move soon.

She tosses and turns in her childhood bed, torn in a thousand directions by fears of the future, memories of the past, the feeling of Havelock’s pistol against her spine seconds before he muttered something about owing a favor to her uncle. There is work to be found, and money for elixers, and what if Morley rebels? She was no true teacher for Emily. Emily will not be ready.

She buries her face against her pillow, blocking out the glow of rat lights, but moments later she is on her back again. She stares up at the ceiling. Eventually, the patterns of water damage blur. She sees flickering shadows, glimpses of a mask in the dark. This time, it comforts her. She doesn’t bother reaching for it.

A shadow stands at the foot of her bed.

She rolls over and goes to sleep.


	17. death and the maiden [corvo/callista, m]

Callista’s lips slid over the rough, pitted metal, her tongue catching on rivets and wiring. Her skin split; blood filled her mouth, dripped down the mask in rivulets. Death’s hands tightened on her waist, drew her closer as if he would kiss her. Her fingers curled around the edges of his hood, keeping him close.

Death held her in his arms, and she whimpered, writhed against him, wrapped herself around him until both could barely move. In return, he grew hard against her.

* * *

 

Outside the tower, the moon had begun its slow ascent over the Wrenhaven. Below, everything was ash and dust, nothing living left. Somewhere on the river, a old sailor nudged his boat towards home.

* * *

 

Death bent her over her desk, and she only reluctantly parted from his mask. Her reward was the endless expanse of night sky beyond the window, and the feel of calloused, scarred hands making quick work of her breeches. She arched back, tried to turn to see him again, but he planted one of those hands firmly on her back and shoved.

* * *

 

She’d never seen him wear his mask before, not for longer than a second as he at last came ashore after his missions. When he’d appeared at the door to the tower, her knees had turned to pudding, and she’d let out a small cry of relief, of fear, of apology.

Emily was gone.

But wherever Corvo Attano had gone, Death had returned in his place. He was calm and final and was willing to wait the long stretch of hours between when the flare went up and when Samuel arrived.

He never removed the mask.

* * *

 

He was rough and unforgiving, and her hips ached in sharp counterpoint to the crashing, burning pleasure of every thrust, grinding into the edge of the desk. She clawed at the smooth wood, braced herself with her legs spread as wide as they could go with her pants around her ankles, muffled sobbing cries in the crook of her arm.

Death was unrelenting; she had learned that as a small girl. When illness stole into the house, or when violence found its mark, there was nothing to be done. Death took everything, and could not be bargained with.

This, though, was the first time she had ever begged for him. Her lips curled at the thought, then parted again in a silent cry.

* * *

 

 _Say something_ , she had told him.  _You’ve never been so quiet_.

He’d said nothing. At times, she’d begun to fear that it wasn’t Corvo instead, that it was some stranger behind the mask. But he moved the same, sat the same, held his weapons the same.

 _Do something_ , she had asked him.  _Let me know this isn’t some nightmare_.

She’d been alone in the tower for days.

Slowly, he rose from the seat he had taken in the low chair between the beds. He’d approached slowly, cautiously, but without fear.

Callista had taken one shuddering breath.

 _Touch me_ , she’d begged him.  _Let me know I’m still alive_.

* * *

 

She could hear him panting, gasping, groaning beneath the mask. Death’s left her back to tangle in her hair, forcing her spine to arch against the stays of her corset. He pulled only until the strain bordered on pain, but no more, and she shuddered and groaned and told him  _yes, yes, please, yes_.

The hand on her hip clutched tighter. The hand in her hair splayed against her scalp, then closed again. She rocked back against him, desperate, so close,  _so_ _close_ , and then he bent his knees just a fraction of an inch, shoved into her at a different angle, and she was lost.

Death held her as she shook apart, curled his arms around her and scraped her shoulder raw with his wired mouth, and continued, unrelenting, heedless of her cries and whimpers.

Distantly, she felt him press deep into her, push her harder against the desk, and then fall still.

Through the window, she made out the faint light of a lamp on the water.

Without a word, Death pulled away and slipped out of the room. Callista lowered herself slowly to the floor, wrapping her arms around herself.

The cold was nearly overwhelming.


	18. the lost world [corvo/callista, m]

It takes time to learn the contours of her body.

The last woman he was with was Jessamine, and she was his everything. He had lived in the hollow of her throat, in the curve of her belly, in the gentle swell of her breasts. Before her, nobody mattered. After her, he’d been sure nobody could again.

And then he’d met Callista Curnow, and she had tugged at him with her distant gaze, the hard set of her lips, her young body and old thoughts. She knew death, and she knew something of the vengeance that burned in him. She would have killed to bring her mother back, her brother, her cousins. He’d brought her back her uncle. She had given Emily some measure of comfort.

Now, months after Burrows was shot in the tunnels beneath the Tower, after Havelock died with a crossbow bolt to the throat, he stretches out along her and begins the painstaking work of learning a different world. Her skin is paler and her body has never borne a child. She carries her tension in her lower back, instead of in her neck. Her legs are longer, her torso shorter.

He trails a hand along her side, and she gasps, arches up against the soft cord binding her to the bed.

His gaze flicks to the knots. They haven’t slid any tighter. Good- he wants to take his time with this, doesn’t want to worry about hurting her. That’s what the knots are there for in the first place. This way, an errant touch to his shoulder that he doesn’t expect won’t make him flinch, lash out, go for her throat.

He is a broken man. His lips twist at the thought, half smile, half grimace, and his head drops forward. He closes his eyes.

“Corvo?” she asks, and his mind supplies a thick patina of fear to those two syllables, but when he looks up, she’s only curious, patient, a little sad. “We don’t have to-“

“No,” he rasps, reaches to cup her cheek. “No, I want to. It’s just- difficult. This isn’t how it should be.”

“We could always wait for a fugue feast,” she says, and he growls around a huffing laugh, bends down and kisses her soundly.

There’s no way he’s waiting that long.

He’s lost time before, lost the world, and he won’t be shut out again.


	19. worth [corvo + callista, m for violence]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Smaragdina wanted Corvo/Callista, something taking place at night, scarring. tw for violence.

Blood dripped onto the floorboards,  _tap tap tap_ , sliding into the joints of the floorboards, seeping into the space below. Callista’s breath came fast and uneven, jolting up to an almost sob, then subsiding back to a bare whisper.

Corvo’s hand tightened around her throat. Her breathing stopped for the span of a heartbeat, two.

“You let them take her,” he growled, the first words he’d said since he’d dragged her from her bed. “ _You let them take her_ ,” he hissed, watched impassive as she clawed, feebly, at his fist. His fingers closed in a little more. Her world spun.

He tensed, let go, dashed her against the floor. ( _Geoff would hear. He would hear and he would come up because of the noise, except Geoff was dead and rotting somewhere, not even burned, not even given a funeral because the Abbey stopped holding funerals and never started again_ -)

Callista gasped and gasped, sucking in breath after breath through the sharp ache in her throat, into the twisting, roiling mass of her belly. She’d thought- she’d thought- she had sent up the flare, and Corvo had gone and saved the day, and she had thought it was all over. She’d moved back into her uncle’s house, even though it was empty now, taken back the last remnants of her family and her past, drawn them tight around her. She’d thought it was all over.

Corvo’s booted foot struck her side, and she rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling.

He wasn’t wearing his mask as he loomed over her, and she thought, distantly, that it must mean something. Who else had he tortured and killed wearing his own face? Not many, not many. She worked her jaw; no sound came out. He crouched over her, leather creaking and cloth rustling, and stared at her, knife glinting in one hand.

“I tried,” she wheezed.

In the dim, midnight light his eyes seemed to glow. His breathing hitched. Slowly, the hand holding the blade fell against his side.

“I tried to keep her safe,” she whispered, fighting past the pain in her side, on her arm, down the side of one cheek where her skin was split by fist and by knife. “I had guns, I had grenades, I had- I was ready- but they didn’t take her from the tower, Corvo. I’m sorry.”

By the rat lights, now tipped over by the window, she could see a thousand thoughts cross the planes of his face. His lips tightened, then slackened; his eyes squinted, went wide, closed, opened; his nostrils flared; his jaw worked. She held her breath.

“I would have died, to keep her safe,” Corvo mumbled. “It should never have been left up to you.”

“I know,” she said.

“You weren’t worthy,” he said.

“ _I know_.” Tears burned in her eyes, from something beyond the pain. There was a resonance in her: he was defined by his charge, and she should have been as well. What else did she have? A stagnant bloodline. An empty house. But she wasn’t worthy, she had never been worthy, she had been a choice of chance, and-

“Neither was I,” Corvo whispered. The knife clattered against the floor.


	20. monument [Callista/Havelock, pwp]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sequel to Ship In a Bottle, more or less. PWP with size difference kink and age difference kink. Ahem.

Havelock’s body covers her as they fall onto his narrow bed, his broad shoulders curved to make a cave for the two of them. His stubble is rough on her cheeks, her jaw, her lips, and she groans and fists her hands in his shirtsleeves, grateful that he managed to shed his uniform before falling upon her.

He’s heavy, heavy enough that when his hips crush against hers in a slow, grinding roll, she can’t move an inch. She kisses him instead, long and slow and hard, and he growls, hands sliding between them to fumble at the laces of her drawers.

He’s over twice her age and more than twice her weight, and the contrast makes her arch and gasp as he gets a hand between her legs, shoving down the fabric, exploring desperately. He’d never tell her, but she suspects she’s the first woman he’s taken into his bed in- some time, at least. It makes her feel glowing, wild, on fire. She nudges at his shoulders and he leans up just enough that she can pull up her shift, throw it to the side.

The way he looks at her stokes the fire hotter still. She squirms until she can spread her legs, slot him between them again. He grinds against her and drops his head to her throat, kisses a path from the bottom of her jaw down to the hollow of her throat, palms her breasts and rubs rough fingers over her nipples. She needs his shirtsleeves off, his trousers  _off_ , and she tugs and plucks and whines until he lets her drag the tight white fabric from his chest.

She’s sliding her palms over the whorls of fine, wiry hair on his chest, over the expanse of muscle stretching between his shoulders, when he pulls away, tugs hard at his belt. She watches, breathless, as he shoves down his trousers, kicks them off the foot of the bed. Her lips are swollen when she licks them, impatiently, half-consciously, and she thinks she sees him smirk for just a moment as he looms over her.

“Move over,” he rumbles, and she does, scooting to the edge of the bed, looking at him quizzically the whole while. He turns over, settles on his back with one knee propped up, then beckons her close. He fits his hands around her waist and pulls her into his lap, straddling him.

What started with a model ship has quickly gotten out of hand. She’s panting and groaning as she rocks her hips against his length (which is  _too_  long, and far, far too thick). What started as an alliance of comfort - his hand spanning her back as they looked out at the river, her listening to him talk about his brother, dead now some forty years but still as painful to think of as the day he faded from the world - is now barreling toward something hot and burning and aching, and all she can do is lean down and kiss him again as she braces one hand against his chest and slips the other between them, taking hold of him and positioning herself just above. Her hand can barely fit around half of him.

She hesitates. Farley’s hand splays against her belly, then trails up between her breasts until he cups her cheek and tilts her head up so he can meet her eyes. She bites her lip, flushes. She wants him, wants him  _desperately_ , and the size of him only makes her want him more, but-

“Where’s that whaler spirit?” he murmurs.

Somehow, he’s found ways to make her smile, grin, laugh out loud, and she does it now, tension in her back and belly uncoiling. She rubs against the tip of his cock, just enough to prove to the both of them how wet she is, and then, never looking away from his eyes, she lowers herself inch by inch onto him.

His eyes narrow to slits, as do hers, but he holds her gaze and she works her hips in small, rocking circles, easing him inside of her, beyond the ache and the throb and the burn of him. She stalls out early, but a few gentle bobs make her gasp and whimper and slide down just a little more. He watches her, hands moving to her hips. They never push down. His thumbs rub soothing circles on the delicate skin on the inner curve of her pelvis, and he grits his teeth and waits.

She bottoms out, takes all that she can, and the sensation and knowledge sends shockwaves of pleasure through her. Her eyes close. Her lips part. And only then, whimpering and spasming around him, does he begin to move in slow, even rolls, the rhythm of a ship on a gentle night.


	21. wicked as they come [Lydia Boyle/Callista Curnow, t]

"Did you know," Lydia Boyle says as she takes Callista's hand and flattens it over her stomach, "that the stays in my corset are real whale bone? None of the steel that's grown so popular. And," she adds, voice dropping to a murmur as her lips curl and she steps closer, "they aren't just _any_ whale bones."

Callista tries her best to look interested, but she's too busy fighting two dueling urges. The first is to run, because nobility have a habit of teasing the creatures beneath their boots. The second is to lean forward that last little inch and kiss Lydia Boyle's gracious painted mouth, kiss her until they melt together, explore the laces of that corset under her blouse and jacket, kneel between her legs and-

That is the far stronger urge. She lifts her chin and tries to look less interested.

"Oh?" Her voice is husky.

Lydia leans in close enough that her lips graze the shell of Callista's ear. "They are carved with old words," she murmurs. Callista's eyes fall half-lidded. "There is power in them to do more than turn a man's head. Isn't that _wicked_?"

Callista can think of a hundred things that seem even more wicked in that moment. Her fingers curl lightly below Lydia's, knuckles brushing the closures of her jacket. "It is, my lady," she agrees.

Lydia doesn't move or speak for a moment, but then she steps back with a small frown.

" _My lady_?" she repeats back, frown deepening. "I thought we were past that, you and I."

"Are we?" Callista asked.

"I've heard you play. We've made music together. I think we're far beyond that. Callista," she says, and the way her lips and tongue shape the name, it's like the world is newborn all over again, "I want us to be friends. I thought..."

Callista holds her breath.

Lydia's tongue peeks out and wets her lips, smears the paint just a touch. "Never mind. I'll see you tomorrow before our lady Empress's lesson?"

"Of course," Callista mumbles, shoulders sagging.

Lydia's halfway to the door when Callista finds her courage again. "Wait," she says, and Lydia pauses, hand on the door. Callista can imagine her little smile. _Yes_ , it says, _break the rules, smash them all to bits, and we shall dance in the wreckage of it all, above this rotting city and a part of it all at once_.

Callista crosses the space between them and, lightly, touches Lydia's back, finds the bumps of her laces. "Did you carve the stays yourself?" she asks.

Lydia looks over her shoulder, and her smile is just as Callista imagined it. "What do you think, Callista?"

Callista falls into the pits of her eyes for just a moment before she presses herself flat against Lydia's back, traps her against the door. She bows her head and speaks into the lady's shoulder. "I'd like to see them, sometime," she murmurs.

Lydia laughs, and her hands slide between them and over Callista's hips.

Callista grins.


	22. death on two legs [Corvo/Daud, m, violent]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for Ripuku!

The Flooded District is empty except for them.

Whalers lie dead in empty, abandoned rooms, or float face-down in the slowly rising muck. Weepers are stretched out across stained and rotting mattresses. The rats feast. The whole district is filled with a throbbing, instinctual-level laugh as events converge and potentials crash into one another.

Daud lies at the bottom of a flight of stairs, and looks up as Corvo descends, step by casual step.

His mask dangles from his belt, unworn. Instead, Daud is treated to the face of the man he destroyed six months ago. It is scarred and bruised and hollow now, and as Daud pushes himself up with groans and grunts, he looks at Corvo’s eyes, not the sword in his hand. His death is there, not on the end of a blade.

He spits blood and a chip of tooth onto the floor, and tries to ignore the way his head spins. “Come on, bodyguard,” he rasps, looking to see any spark of anger or recognition, anything beyond the blank and all-consuming wrath.  _You’re a bodyguard, not an assassin_ , he thinks. And then he thinks,  _But I changed that, didn’t I. I infected you._

Daud has never cared about a single thing in his life with the unflinching devotion this creature in front of him - because he’s not a man, not anymore - feels for a murdered woman and her child.

Corvo takes the steps one by one, but when Daud raises his left hand, tenses to fire a bolt, a whirlwind of force smacks into his chest and sends him stumbling backwards.

“Fuck your theatricalities!” Daud hisses as he nearly trips over a collapsed bookshelf. “You’re not Death on two legs, you’re a man!” He’s lying.

Corvo knows it, and never speeds up.

Daud lunges, and Corvo paries, easily. He’s no longer the determined but frightened bodyguard thrashing and kicking and shouting. He’s all stillness and single-minded purpose. Daud staggers at a sharp blow to his shoulder, steel cutting through leather and cloth and flesh, and waits for another, more fatal strike to his throat. It doesn’t come. Instead, Corvo takes Daud by that same, bloody shoulder and forces him against the wall. The Mark glows on his hand.

“You’ve got no shame, do you,” Daud sneers. “Showing our friend’s Mark to the world, daring it to cut it out of your flesh.”

“I have shame,” Corvo says, and his voice is soft and uneven from ill-use. His fingers curl into the gash, prying it apart. Daud curses and jerks, but Corvo slams his full weight into him, pins him in place. He watches Daud’s face with hawklike intensity. And then he grabs hold of the torn flesh and jerks, hard, until Daud feels skin and muscle rip and he howls, pain and rage making him punch forward, strike with every limb.

Corvo remains unmoved, but his head drops, and he stares at the work his hand does.

Daud wishes he would put his blade to his throat; then he could end this, jerk forward and slice his artery open, cover Corvo in his life and leave him to grow cold.

He also knows he would never do it, because he doesn’t want to join the litter of corpses, the remnants of his life. He isn’t ready.

“She’s not in there,” he says. “If you tear me into a thousand pieces she won’t be in any of them.”

“I know,” Corvo says. He has four fingers in the wound, hooked and wriggling, and Daud’s head swims from the pain. His head falls back against the wall. His ankle is twisted and close to broken, his body is bruised, and he’s bleeding from so many other cuts and wounds that he can’t keep track of them all, but his attention has narrowed to where Corvo seems to be trying to wind his way inside of him.

“What are you doing?”

Corvo doesn’t answer, except to strike him hard in the gut with his knee. Daud tries to fall, but Corvo holds him up, puppets him by his arm.

“It was all for money,” Daud spits. “Every teaspoon of blood in her that I spilled. Is that what you want to know? It didn’t feel good, and it didn’t feel bad. It felt like nothing. It felt like ashes.” That was a lie, too.

The beast before him seems to know it. He releases Daud’s arm at last, and curls those same fingers around this throat. His body is taught along Daud’s, and in another place, in another time, Daud might have let himself enjoy it. That his body presses into Corvo’s unrelenting frame now is more desperation than anything else.

Slowly, Corvo strokes the column of his pulse.

“So are you going to kill me?” he asks.

Corvo considers a moment, then meets his gaze. Dead, bloated, rotting things stare out from his eyes.

“No.”


	23. what fight is left in him [t]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anon on tumblr asked for Corvo's execution!

They expect more fight out of him.

Maybe it’s because on the last day of his interrogations, he had glared through blood-shot, sunken eyes, had spit blood from his mouth now filled with broken, jagged teeth and abscessed pits, had managed guttural cries and booming curses, louder than they had ever heard him shout before. Maybe it’s because all assembled have known him in a different time, as a different man. The man being loaded into the mechanized carriage, shackled and with his head tilted up in a heavy metal collar that stretched from shoulder to the corners of his jaw, had once been watchful and guarded and alert. Now his eyes are dull. Blank.

It had been a difficult decision, whether to execute him in public or not. Caution said to keep it private, to have a shiv slipped between his ribs by some overzealous guard they could silence after, or by another criminal kept in the bowels of Coldridge until all sense had left. Corvo Attano is a dangerous man; he deserves a calculated, controlled exit.

But the people need closure. That much is certain, with the growing plague and the growing riots, and so they take him to the main thoroughfare where Jessamine Kaldwin’s funeral procession once passed, and then to a plaza off to the west of it. It’s a quiet place, a forgotten place, but it fills with onlookers. The propaganda officer sets his microphones up around the square, and the whale-oil generator hums loud enough to obliterate thought or dissent.

Corvo does not tremble. He does not curse. He simply plods ever-forward, and for a few blissful minutes, Hiram Burrows thinks he’s won.

There’s still hope for a confession, and it burns in his chest as he stares out at the crowd. They whisper and seethe, a mass of wretched, grasping creatures. The businessmen and aristocrats who give Dunwall its strength are by him, on the other side of the plaza. If it weren’t for the uncertainty of exactly how the plague is spreading, he might have arranged for another outbreak.

But Corvo’s death will be enough.

A firing squad would, perhaps, have been more appropriate and final than the single Watch captain - Geoff Curnow, and he has volunteered for this honor - who holds a loaded pistol to Corvo’s upturned forehead, but it is better for a large crowd. Less risk of panic if a shot goes wild. It also makes him look like he trusts Dunwall; they don’t need to know about the Watchmen waiting close by to lock down the square if the need arises.

"Do you have any last words?" Burrows calls into a microphone that amplifies his voice across the space, loud enough that it drowns out the hum of the generators and vibrates the screws in Corvo’s collar. “An apology, perhaps, for what you have done?"

Corvo is silent. Geoff Curnow’s shoulders are stiff. They knew each other, and for a moment Burrows wonders if perhaps this is all a plan. Will Curnow turn and aim his gun at Burrows’s box? Will they try to stage a breakout? Is this somehow all arranged?

But Corvo is silent, and Curnow is motionless except for a slight bow of his head (a sign? Burrows motions for the Watch to close in).

"Very well. Before I give to Dunwall your rightful death, Attano, I would like to make an announcement."

He lifts his chin, stares out at the crowd. They are silent.

"We have found Lady Emily Kaldwin, and she is currently being brought safely back to Dunwall Tower. Your plot is foiled, Attano. The end."

Curnow looks up, startled, and Corvo moves at last. He tries to rise to his feet. But Burrows has already raised his hand, and though Curnow shakes and stares at Corvo, who rages and froths and suddenly is not so placid at all, is the beast they knew him for in Coldridge-

He pulls the trigger.

The crack of his gun echoes through the square.

Corvo slumps, dead, propped up by the metal keeping Dunwall safe from his inconvenient truths.

And Hiram Burrows lets out a breath he has been holding for six months, and goes to see to the rescue and re-education of his legitimacy.


	24. Than To Be Unmade [Pendletwins, g]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> gigiwilkins asked:
> 
> Pendleshits. One of them has a cold or something and is bedridden and the other takes it upon himself to play nurse UuU

Morgan stares down at Custis laid out in bed. He’s stopped his whining, his bitching, his endless shifting, and now he’s very still, and Morgan has begun to worry. It’s a pointless, childish fear, but it is also deep and primal.

It happens every time one of them is sick. It doesn’t matter what the doctor says, or how mild an illness it is; the bone-wrenching terror of being left alone one day has never lessened. Custis has suggested that it’s a holdover from seeing their mother die, and their father, but Morgan knows he’s lying.

They both know it’s about their own mortality, a subject both love to ignore.

If Custis can die, then, of course, so can Morgan. And if Custis  _does_  die before Morgan, then Morgan is alone. When their father died, they were bereft, but not alone, and they will hardly mark Treavor’s death except with a toast.

But  _Custis_ … his life has a certain weight to it. Not as great as Morgan’s does, of course, but enough to distort the fabric of his reality so much that when Custis grows ill, Morgan becomes a child again. He begins to come unmade.

He sits, like a nursemaid, at his brother’s bedside and watches his breathing.

Two days later, Custis is whole again - of course. They are hearty and hale, not their sickly little brother’s stock, and Morgan forgets he ever feared.

But there are times, when Custis sleeps, that Morgan still creeps close to hear the sound of his breathing.

Better to be a fool than to be unmade.


	25. A Merchant's Wet Dream [Pendletwins, t]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More Pendletwins for Gigi

"What the fuck is this?" Morgan asks, squinting at the small glass bottle and turning it around so it catches the light. "Are you trying to tell me I stink, brother?"

"It’s not perfume," Custis sighs, sprawling back against the couch. "It’s an import. It’s tobacco from that strain they got from Pandyssia, grown in Serkonos, then made into  _snuff._ The bottle’s from Tyvia. It’s a merchant’s wet dream. And it’s damn good, too.”

Morgan tosses the bottle back to Custis, and Custis nearly preens. If anybody else had given it to Morgan - maybe even Father, had Father still been alive - he would have smashed the bottle to prove his distaste. Only Custis isn’t disgraced. He catches the bottle and pops the top off.

"They paint the inside, you know."

"Of the tobacco?"

"Of the bottle, you idiot," Custis says as he reaches for the thin spoon he’s had sitting beside him the whole time. "Come here. I’ll show you how it’s done."

"Like I’ve never seen snuff taken before," Morgan says, tossing his head to clear his hair from his eyes, but he saunters over all the same.

"Hold out your hand. And no, you haven’t. They’ve only just started bringing the stuff into the ports."

Morgan holds out his right hand, and Custis inhales sharply, then languidly rolls his shoulders and slips the spoon into the jar.

"Palm  _down_ ,” he says, and Morgan complies.

He measures out a spot of snuff onto Morgan’s fingernail, then sets the jar and spoon aside and leans down. He closes one nostril with a finger, then snorts the powder into his nose. It burns, then settles, and he sighs, leaning back.

"It looks ridiculous," Morgan says, but he gestures sharply for Custis to lift his own hand.

He complies - his left, the match to Morgan’s right, where they were connected.

He puts the snuff on his pinky, and holds it out.


	26. It's All Rather Wretched [Waverly/Treavor, g]

She will need the company.

That’s what he tells himself. He has seen Morgan and Custis grow furious (and terrified, though they hide it with their viciousness) at the thought of losing each other. The Boyle sisters were never so close, but they were certainly closer than Treavor was to his brothers, and so he feels confident assuming that they will mourn Lydia and that her death will leave a hole that must be filled by something of life.

Perhaps, if it had been Esma to die, Waverly would have been fine. He can imagine Waverly and Lydia - though not always the best of friends - coming together. But Waverly is too angry with Esma, thinks she’s foolish, and Esma is… Esma.

As it is, she will need the company.

So he has Wallace comb his hair with the finest Serkonan oils, and he dons his best mourning black and goes to call on her. There are many others, of course. The manor that nearly became a charnel house is filled with flowers of all sorts. He curses as he steps into the grand entryway, for he has brought only a small handful of honeysuckle and gelsemium. He’d had visions of her smiling, with that distant griefstricken hue, at his acknowledgment of the time she’d nearly killed him.

But now he is small and faded and hardly noticeable.

He is considering where to discard the flowers when he hears her voice. She comes down the steps at a clip, and he sees the flash in her eyes that means she’s in one of her states, where she grows fast and wicked-sharp and dangerous. She will dance and smile and laugh as she is now, but she will also turn violent, easily.

Esma looks out over the balcony of the second floor.

"Just like you, Pendleton!" she snaps, and she is on him, glowering, and he remembers as he always does (too late, always too late) that she has two inches on him even without her heels, and that when she is furious he is even more given to notions of love and desire. "I came to your estate to pay my respects and you were  _gone_ , but here you come with flowers? Don’t think I don’t understand your games.”

"Games?"

"Setting yourself above me. Pretending you are strong, and I am weak. I won’t have it!"

And she slaps him. The blow stings but he drinks it up, closing his eyes.

With a strange sort of calm, he shoves the flowers at her, then lets go and steps back, reaching for his cigarette case.

When he looks at her again, he’s stunned to find her inspecting one of the blossoms. She lifts her eyes. She stares.

"It’s all rather wretched, isn’t it?" he asks, and what he had hoped would sound detached and disinterested sounds pained, hopeful.

She reaches for a cigarette from his case.


End file.
